


someone whose name you can't remember

by amandaskankovich



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-15
Updated: 2014-11-15
Packaged: 2018-02-25 11:06:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2619491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amandaskankovich/pseuds/amandaskankovich
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ian’s the one who finds it.<br/>Just like that at a bottom of a drawer covered in junk mail, rubber bands, nails. He’d been looking for a pen.<br/>"Who’s this?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	someone whose name you can't remember

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning for drowning.

Ian’s the one who finds it.  
Just like that at a bottom of a drawer covered in junk mail, rubber bands, nails. He’d been looking for a pen.  
"Who’s this?"  
Of course he probably knew. It wouldn’t have been hard to figure out.  
She looked just like Mandy but 20 years older (and never any older than that).  
Mandy walks by in a rush already late for work. She gives the picture a glance and says, “Sophia.”  
Then she’s out the door, not looking back, not engaging, not going to talk about it.  
Ever.  
*  
The fact that he’s even curious makes him a total piece of shit, right?  
"How did your Mom die?"  
It’s not just something you get to ask.  
You can want to ask.  
It could be killing you to ask.  
But if it’s been three years and you’re just now learning her name you don’t get to just ask.  
But then your boyfriend walks in on you laying on your bed (which is also his) starring at a picture of his dead mom and when he actually snatches it from you and tosses it into another drawer of socks with holes.  
You want to ask.  
But you can’t just ask, right?  
*  
She could probably ask.  
Maybe.  
Smoking in a silk robe stirring spaghetti sauce.  
Her and your boyfriend’s infant son asleep in a playpen in the living room.  
She could ask because she doesn’t give a shit.  
There are no consequences.  
He either tells her or demands she fuck off.  
(The latter option being the most likely)  
"You got a mother?" He asks instead, "Back in Russia?"  
He touched the sleeping baby on the back as he was walking in.  
Because he’d been way too still and there’s always that small fear they won’t wake up.  
But then you see the tiny back rise and fall.  
So you keep walking into the kitchen.  
"She’s dead," Svetlana says with no hesitation.  
Another dead mother.  
Don’t they ever just leave anymore?  
"How’d she die?"  
"She got sick."  
And the story ended there.  
She turns to look at him, “You gonna sit or you gonna make yourself useful?”  
She hands him the spoon, “Stir.” She says, “I’m going to go feed baby.”  
She walks swiftly away from, out the kitchen.  
A very much alive mother walking up the stairs with her barely awake but still alive son.  
*  
He thinks about Monica dying.  
And he can’t really imagine it.  
He can imagine her gone because she is always gone until she isn’t.  
She is this disappearing, reappearing force.  
He can imagine her bloody, bruised, beaten.  
But dead?  
No.  
Never.  
He thought he’d felt the same about Frank but then there was that time when Frank was in front of him in a hospital bed and almost gone.  
And he could imagine him dead.  
It had been very easy.  
His boyfriend lays beside him, not asleep.  
"Mickey…how did your mom die?"  
You are expecting silence and you get it.  
For a very long span of seconds.  
He doesn’t turn from where he is but he does say after a little while.  
"She drowned."  
Whatever list of possibilities you’d been expecting that hadn’t been on it.  
"How?"  
You wait for him to answer and your brain for a second spits out ridiculous possibilities. Like the Miloviches in a boat at some point somehow.  
Milkoviches at sea.  
You almost smile but then he starts talking again.  
"In the tub."  
"Oh."  
You remember being in art class and seeing this painting during a slide show.  
Ophelia.  
By someone whose name you can’t remember.  
"She and my dad had been partying all weekend. He passed out. She shot up, got in the tub, fell asleep. It was a couple hours before anybody noticed. Mandy found her. There wasn’t even that much water in the tub but she fucking face planted in it and stayed there…."  
"Holy shit."  
"Yeah," he turns over, "I guess."  
*  
"Do you miss her?" He does not ask this.  
Give him some credit.  
He thinks of Monica not dead wherever she is.  
Blisteringly, infuriatingly alive and not here.  
The answer is always yes.  
*  
In a picture in a drawer she has a face like his best friend’s.  
He wonders if there are bruises there covered in make up.  
She’s smiling.  
*  
Mickey speaks again.  
"It was an accident. I think. Mandy doesn’t."  
"It probably was." Ian offers.  
Mickey says, “It’s weird that was even there. She didn’t like getting her picture taken.”  
Ian leans over.  
Puts his hand on his boyfriend’s chest.

It’s not so much that you want to forget.

It’s that remembering is pointless and painful.

There’s nothing you can do.

You cannot will her back.

"I’m sorry I said anything."

He put his hand on top of yours, on top of him.

"It’s weird," he says, "She’s always older inside my head. But she doesn’t look very old in that picture and there’s the date in the corner. It was the same year she died that was taken. Some month too."

Mickey looks at you, “I thought she was older.”

You lean forward and you kiss him.

That night you dream of Sophia and Monica in a boat.

Sailing away.

You call out to them, “Turn around!”

They don’t.

Of course.

If they could do that maybe they never would have left to begin with.


End file.
